I will certainly not!

If the guy who yelled at me outside a church last week was pretty brazen, he's got nothing on the fine upstanding citizen I encountered down at Pike Place Market yesterday.

I skipped down there at lunch to pick up some Asian pears and salad greens at the Wednesday organic market, then decided to hop on over to Cost Plus for walnut oil and green tea.

I'm about a block away, passing a Tully's on my left and a parked delivery truck on my right. As I pass the back end of the truck, a guy steps up onto the sidewalk. I'm not particularly paying attention to him, but I hear him say something about the scarf I'm wearing (one of my favorites...a cute leopard print I bought almost 15 years ago at Banana Republic). I keep walking, of course, and don't even make it to the end of the block before this anonymous guy screams at me an, ahem, order (I really can't call it a request) to perform a certain intimate act on him. And he punctuates the order by calling me a bitch.

Now, I am a bitch, but really, how would he know that? And He-Who-Puts-Up-With-Me would probably not appreciate it if I went along with the rest of what the guy said.

I'm thinking this is a sign that I should just get the hell out of Dodge. More on that later...

Locker room parity

In a near-panic, I ran down to school early this week to claim a locker, knowing full well that if I waited until my first day of class (today), I would either be stuck with a locker that sticks, or with one of the puny lockers that won't hold more than a set of street clothes.

And the thought of lugging my heavy tool box full of baking paraphanalia to and from class three days a week did NOT make me happy, let me tell you.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I rush to the culinary floor shortly before 8 a.m. (which meant I was certainly not going to make it to work by that very hour, but sacrifices must be made), and discover that the men's and women's locker rooms had been swapped.

I swipe my key card, enter, and am awash in awestruck wonder by the very vastness of this room. The selection of available lockers was so plentiful, that I wasn't sure how to choose. But choose I did...a fine, non-sticking locker in a prime location. Yippee skippy.

Still humming with joy over this happy development, when I arrived at work I e-mailed one of my classmates about it. She thanked me for the news, and asked me if I was "surprised" by my grades from last quarter.

"Not really," I replied. I got an 'A' in my chocolate class, and an 'A-' in each of my two cakes classes. Because this classmate was on my team, which means we made the same cakes, I assumed that she would have recieved the same grades.

And what happens when you assume, boys and girls? That's right, you make an 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me.' Oh, no. She did not get the same grades I did for cakes. She got a 'B+' and a 'B-." and the other person on our team got an 'A-' and a 'B-.'

I was flabbergasted. I expressed as much, mentioning that perhaps the grade on our final project (we had to develop a cake menu along with a brochure, cost sheets, etc.) was the determining factor.

I haven't heard from her since. And this was two days ago. Class begins tonight. Our overcrowded artisan breads class. And tomorrow we have advanced cakes from the same chef who gave such mysterious grades.

I haven't paid my tuition yet. Maybe I should just drop out before I get a knife in my back.

No, not really. But I am truly not looking forward to this term as much as I once was. (Sigh.)